Debian Weekly News - April 17th, 2002

Welcome to this year's sixteenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Not directly related to Debian, but probably affecting
all of us: ZDnet recently reported about two major players in the computer world which have been
busy behind the scenes for the last two years building a toll booth that could
position them to collect royalties on most if not all Internet traffic.

Woody CD Image. Raphaël Hertzog asked
people to test a new feature which is planned to get used on the first official
binary CD for Woody. With this feature you are able to select a kernel
flavour at boot-time, instead of booting from a different CD for each flavour.
Please fetch the image from here, burn it
on CD and try to boot it. You can also install Debian with it if you
want. :)

Rsync and Debian. Martin Pool, the current upstream
maintainer of rsync, collected questions and answers about the
integration of rsync in the Debian server network. He compiled
them into a document
which hopefully reduces similar threads on our mailing lists. It's pretty
informal, but hopefully will be useful. Please send comments to mbp@samba.org.

Determining a Suitable Filesystem. Recently, Michal
Frackowiak asked
which filesystem is most suitable for his laptop. Even though some journaling
filesystems like Ext3FS, ReiserFS are supported by the Linux kernel 2.4,
the performance seemed not to be fully tested. Mark Janssen pointed
out that ext3 will keep the disk busy writing the journal, so shutting
down the harddisk won't work anymore.

Installing Debian on an iBook. A while ago Edd Dumbill
released an article in which he describes how an iBook can be installed with Debian
GNU/Linux. After years wandering in the cranky wilderness of mix-and-match
PCs he wanted to work on a computer that feels like it has a soul. The best
resource, however, covering the Installation of Debian on this machine is
Branden Robinson's Installing Debian 3.0 onto an Apple iBook page.

Open Letter to Lindows.com. Bruce Perens, former Debian
Project Leader and Free Software evangelist, recently sent an open letter
to Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com,
Inc. Bruce points out very politely that they are both partners, who have
agreed to certain rules. The main reason for sending this letter is that a
first beta version (binary-only) of LindowsOS, which is said to be based on
Debian, has been released to a limited number of beta testers and the company
hasn't yet fulfilled its source-code obligation. Bruce was
also distressed by Robertsons treatment of the FSF and Bradley Kuhn, which was reported in Newsforge.

Building Debian on top of OpenBSD. Andreas Schuldei planned for
a while to create a secure Debian GNU/OpenBSD, consisting of the best of both
worlds. He recently released tools required for
creating Debian packages of software on an OpenBSD system. This effort will
succeed faster and will be more fun for each person if more people work on it,
of course. If you have questions, please contact Andreas directly.

KDE3 for Debian. Several peopleaskedwhen packages
for KDE3 will be ready. Chris
Cheney released his plans for
this version. KDE 3.0 will not go into sid until woody is released, which is
currently scheduled for May 1. Chris may also wait until after XFree 4.2 is
released so that recompilation won't be needed. However, preliminary packages will be
made available once packaging kdebase is finished. For those of you, who are
worried about interaction between development files of KDE2 and KDE3, here's a
document
describing the issue.

CVS Repository for OpenOffice. Peter Novodvorsky
(Петр Новодворский), the
person who initially built a Debian package from OpenOffice, announced
that a several Debian people have joined their efforts more closely and are
now working through a public CVS archive. The mail referenced above contains
all details you'll need to know in order to access the archive anonymously.
Since commit messages are sent to the debian-openoffice list,
subscribers can follow development of Debian packages. It has also been very
recently mentioned that OpenOffice could even be uploaded into main since the last
remaining dependency for a non-free library was removed.

Bdale Garbee is new Project Leader. Manoj Srivastava,
current project secretary, announced
the results of our Project Leader Election. According to the results page, the winner
is Bdale Garbee (here is his campaign platform).
We would like to thank Branden Robinson and Raphaël Hertzog for their service
to the project, and congratulate Bdale Garbee for this honorable service.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 106 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

Got News? Please inform us about everything that is
happening in the Debian community. We are always looking for any interesting
stories to add, especially new items by volunteer writers, and topics we tend
to miss. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.